flypig.co.uk

Location

Welcome

I'm David Llewellyn-Jones and this is my homepage. I'm a software engineer at Jolla, who's also interested in programming, security, privacy and graphics. I occasionally crave adventure and a good thunderstorm. You might be interested in my software, my research or my random musings.

Want to know more about me? Here's a personality sketch written by a psychologist when I was in school.

“David is of high intelligence, although lacking in true creativity. He has a need for order and clarity, and for neat and tidy systems in which every detail finds its appropriate place. His writing is rather dull and mechanical, occasionally enlivened by somewhat corny puns and by flashes of imagination of the sci-fi type. He has a strong drive for competence. He seems to have little feel and little sympathy for other people and does not enjoy interacting with others. Self-centered, he nonetheless has a deep moral sense.”

News

I've not had a chance to properly update this site since I moved to Tampere and started working for Jolla. Eventually I'll get around to updating my About page with the proper info, and maybe writing a blog post about the experience of moving. In the meantime, I've at least updated the homepage.

11 Sep 2018 : Meeting Agriculture PhD students from Africa and Cybersecurity academics from the UK#

One of the wonderful things about academia is that you you get to meet such varied individuals from diverse backgrounds and disciplines. It was a real privilege to present at two very different events over the last week. On Friday I spoke to the latest cohort of the Cybersecurity Academic Startups Accelerator Programme. I spoke about scoping their MVPs (and especially, what not to do), and was impressed by their ideas and enthusiasm. They're doing great work, and it's needed now more than ever. Then yesterday I spoke to seventeen of the top PhD researchers working in Agriculture Research from across Africa. I know nothing about agriculture research, but was really happy to evangelise about how to create publication-quality graphs from data using automated tools. Even with my limited understanding of their research it was clear that the work these students are doing is really important, for example understanding the consequences of harvesting techniques on crops, and using longitudinal data to increase crop yeilds. I've added the slides for my talks to my presentations page.

Prompted by the very motivational RISC OS advocate Steffen Huber, I've started putting my old RISC OS source code up on GitHub. Steffen contacted me hoping to make some changes to TapirMail, the self-contained POP3 mail client I used to sell commercially. I wouldn't have expected anyone to still be interested in it, so thank you Steffen for proving me wrong!

Looking over the source code, I see I started coding it in 2003, with the last version released in 2013, so it's a decade-worth of on-and-off coding. I didn't use any version control for it back then, so the details of how it developed will be forever lost. I also coded differently back then. It was probably the first large C application I'd written from scratch, and my transition from using the BASIC interpreter shows: the main application is coded as a single 21,000-line source file! The full source is now available on GitHub released under an MIT licence, allowing you to judge my younger self. Expect more code-dumps of my old RISC OS software to follow in the future.

The latest version of Pedalo, version 0.2-1, has passed through the harbour validation and checks, and is now available for download from the Jolla store. If you're on Sailfish OS, and like to pedalo (or cycle), then grab yourself a free copy and get cycling.

Thanks to promting from Prof, Asim at the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Pakistan, I finally got around to putting the MATTS source code up online (it took seven years, which is a record even for me). Take a look at the MATTS page for more info. Thanks Asim!